C. Current Contents of Blank Tapes Bought for Own Use

Respondents were asked to indicate the current contents of the 8-tracks and cassettes they had purchased for their own use. Specifically, they were asked for the number of tapes that (1) were still blank, (2) contained school or office work, (3) contained personal or family recordings, and (4) contained music or other professional entertainment.

The data show that 7% of cartridges and 13% of cassettes were still blank at the time of the survey. If one assumes that these unused blank tapes will be used in the same fashion as those already recorded upon, Table 4 shows that 87% of 8 tracks and 71% of cassettes will, in the final analysis, be covered with music. By taking into account the frequency of purchase of each configuration and by assuming that the use of reel-to-reel tapes lies midway between the use of 8-tracks and cassettes (e.g., that 79% [(87 + 71)/2] of blank reel-to-reel tapes are used to record music), we arrive at the percentages in column 3 of Table 4 which shows final blank tape usage across all configurations. It can be seen that fully 75% of all blank tapes purchased in the 1980 survey year were ultimately used to record Music or other professional entertainment.

D. Estimated Dollars Based on Actual
Units Purchased.

Recall that all respondents were asked to indicate (by configuration) the total number of blank tape units they had purchased for their own use as well as the number they had covered with music. By assuming that tapes purchased for others are used in the same way as those purchased for own use, the total number of blank tapes purchased as well as the number that are ultimately used to record music can be calculated. Table 5 shows total unit purchases as well as the number used to record music. As noted previously, 75% (257.7/344.3) of all blank tapes are ultimately used to record music.

By multiplying units purchased by the median price paid for each configuration at retail, it is possible to arrive at an independent estimate of dollars spent on all blank tape and more importantly, dollars spent on blank tape to record music. These data are also presented in Table 5.

Perhaps the first thing to note is that this method of multiplying units by median price results in an estimate of $799 million total spending on blank audio tape-the same figure as that obtained from the direct question concerning total dollar spending for blank tapes (See Table 2). This provides evidence for the internal consistency and validity of the data.

More important, as shown in Table 5, over $609 million was spent on the more than 250 million blank tapes used for the home taping of music. In other words, 76% (609/799) of all dollars spent on blank tapes was used to bring music into the home. As we will point out later, this $609 million figure provides a very conservative estimate of the additional amount of money that consumers would have spent on records and prerecorded tapes if home taping were not possible.

A. General Taping Behavior

All respondents were shown a card describing three types of audio taping: (1) school or office work, (2) personal or family recordings, and (3) music and other professional entertainment. They were asked if they had ever done any of these types of taping. Those who answered yes were then asked if they had done any of these types of taping in the past 12 months. As reported in Part I, 39% of the total U.S. population age 10 and over, or 73 million people, had made at least one audio recording in their lifetime. Further, 56 million people or 30% of the population were current tapers: that is, did some form of audio taping during the survey year. B. Types of Taping

All current tapers were asked to indicate the number of hours they spent in each of the three types of taping in the past 12 months. Table 6 shows the percent of the total population and the percent of current tapers who spent at least some time making each type of recording. In addition, the Table also gives the percent of total taping hours accounted for by each type of recording.

The home taping of music is, by far, the most frequent taping activity: 21% of the population or 39 million people had recorded music or other professional entertainment during the survey year. Therefore, only 9% (30% -21%) of the population make only nonmusic recordings.

Table 6 also shows that 66% of all taping hours were spent taping music. Recall from Table 4, however, that 75% of blank tapes were ultimately covered with music. This implies either that it takes less time to cover a tape with music than to cover it with personal, school or office recordings or that tapes used for nonmusic purposes are reused more frequently than tapes used to record music. In either case, it is important to note that the amount of time spent making different types of recordings does not accurately describe the amount of blank tape used to make these recordings. For example, if the percent of time spent making music recordings (66%) were used to estimate the percent of blank tapes used for this purpose, a serious underestimate of the actual percent of blank tape (75%) used to record music would result.